Sunday, March 15, 2009

Ha ha, score another win for SCIENCE! you clever spirits think that you can haunt us, well, have we got a little solution for you! Your little haunting scheme will be entirely subverted when we put two mirrors next to each other!

Now I'm going to be honest: I can't tell exactly what's happening here. Is that the same ghost getting reflected back and forth? Is it lots of different ghosts from lots of different mirrors flying out at once? Why is she flying at all? I kind of figured she would just sort of appear there, or maybe appear in the mirror or something.

I think it's tricky to make a joke like this off of a childhood urban myth: everyone knows a different version of the story, and unless you are thinking of the same one as Randall, it might not make sense.

Honestly the biggest problem I see is that it feels too damn much like comic 537, in that a character goes and tries to set up a needless loop by exploiting some property of the thing in question. They just felt similar to me.

Lastly, no, you're not the only one who was reminded of it, I was reminded of it, too.

whatever Carl you should just accept that you have jumped the shark and you just don't get XKCD because it's a niche comic and I'm totally going to start xkcdsuckssucks.blogspot.com. at least you are not Rob though, man! I just can't stand him, it is like reading Carl fan-fiction.

i always thought that bloody mary would break the mirror as she came through to feast on the flesh of the living. just like the universal studios halloween horror nights commercials from last year. that would totally break the whole infinite loop thing.

It's okay to have a reference; it depends what you do with it.If it simply presents, then that is junk. That is like Disaster Movie humor. "Hey, look: Paris Hilton!"The strip does more than this. It's funny because a man who is ridiculed for confusing windmills for monsters actually has to fight monstruous windmills, and thus we depend on him. Explaining a joke always makes it less funny, though. . .=/

Anyway it's stupid because it's the barest minimum Don Quijote reference. No Sancho Panza (who's imagined reaction to ACTUAL walking windmills could be hilarious), no indication that he thinks the windmills are giants, not even a comment from the other people like "We're screwed" (remember that Don Quijote utterly fails at tilting windmills)!

Come now Carl. The one most common element in *any* childhood "bloody mary" is that something pops out of the mirror and rocks your proverbial shit. This is common enough that the thing popping out of the mirror going RRRARARRRGH usually shows up in bad movies.

You seem to criticize XKCD a lot for this. If any one senior citizen in Zimbabwe might not understand the comic, you seem to feel it's not inclusive enough. Such as your complaints vis a vis the "terminator" comic, regarding a movie- nay, a franchise- consisting of four movies, a planned trilogy, a currently-running TV spinoff series, and a dozen games. Not to mention it singlehandedly made one of the lead actors so famous that he would later leverage it to become the currently sitting governor of motherfucking California.

But you apparently didn't see the movie so that's bad.

Sorry, I haven't had much sleep in the last 24 hours and I'm testy.

The only version I can remember that was different posited that "Bloody Mary" would manifest in the bathroom as a baby sitting atop a pile of blood.

Yes, a pile. I shit you not, sir.

As for the looping similarity, I disagree. The duckaloop did indeed have the whole "loop" dynamic as a more integral part, (hell, the comic was CALLED "duckaloop.) This one, however, is really a joke about how science/computer geeks think. Normal people go "holy SHIT she pops out of the mirror THAT'S FREAKY." Science geeks think, "pops out of the mirror? How? Gee, what happens if you change the variables?" It's the incongruity between the supernatural event, and the curiosity experiment being done.

As for exactly what's happening, the comic is called "mirrors." It involves two mirrors By a tremendous leap of insight, I was able to conclude that it is likely one ghost being reflected between two mirrors. It took a tremendous effort of brainpower, but somehow I won through.

The comic defies programming logic. Which xkcd really should not do. Each mirror's Bloody Mary should only be jumping forward 1 iteration, not all the way to the front.

Setting all that aside, this is the -same- Mary coming out of both mirrors, right? So maybe a better sight gag would have her upper half coming out one end, while the lower half is stuck coming out the other mirror. Or something.

The new one is surprisingly not bad. For the first time since the Obama menstruation strip (which everyone hated) I actually chuckled after reading it. Though I don't understand how a windmill looks even remotely like the Martian tripod.

(please don't point out that it's impossible for a company to be both private limited and public limited simultaneously; I know it. For God's sake, you could frickin' go down to Companies House and point out that the ACTUAL COMPANY DOESN'T EXIST if accuracy bothers you so much)

Demitrisux: See, I was pretty sure it was an infinite regression of ghosts all popping out of the mirror at the same time, because 'one ghost being reflected back and forth' not only misses the obvious setup in panel 2 (you know, the panel which is obviously a setup for the fact that there's an infinite regression of mirrors), even Randy isn't dumb enough to make posts about how ghosts are apparently light rays and reflect off of mirrors.

I kind of figured that Marys would just keep hurtling forward, so maybe if there's little enough gap between mirrors, they could rely on momentum to carry them through the next portal. And this doesn't happen in real life because people don't line up mirrors like that!

Rob: I finally realized why you were spelling my name that way. Wow, "Demetrisux." How clever! Your rapier wit truly reduces me to ashes, sir. I suppose I should now refer to you as "Rambunctiously Oblivious Buffoon," at every iteration now. That should make my e-peen grow at lightspeed, right?

If you want to be a troll, at least expend some effort. We've got enough witless ones as is.

As for the regression, that's a fair point, but a ghost reflecting from one mirror to another isn't out of the question, because countless dumb movies have actually used that; the same movies that helped establish bloody mary as inevitably something that "pops out of a mirror to trash your shit." Or perhaps, because of the established ability to step in and out of "mirror world," what we are seeing is "thinking with portals."

The point is- who fucking cares? Does it effect the joke in any way? No. No, it does not.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Rob's Rants

When he's not flipping a shit over prescriptivist and descriptivist uses of language, xkcdsucks' very own Rob likes writing long blocks of text about specific subjects. Here are some of his excellent refutations of common responses to this site. Think of them as a sort of in-depth FAQ, for people inclined to disagree with this site.